Monday, March 22nd 2021
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Anti-Mining Feature Bypassed by HDMI Dummy Plug
When NVIDIA introduced its GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, the company also introduced a new feature to go along with it. As the card is priced well, it is positioning itself as a very good value offer for mining. Given that NVIDIA has now separate products for mining, it naturally would like to limit the number of gaming cards sold to miners. To achieve that, the company introduced an anti-mining algorithm that is essentially a handshake between the driver, RTX 3060 silicon, and the GPU VBIOS. This handshake checks those three components to detect if mining is going on, so it can limit the performance of the card.
However, even such a thing can be bypassed. Usually, miners put their GPUs in rigs where most of the GPUs don't use their video outputs. And the GPU can detect if it is connected to the monitor or not, triggering the anti-mining algorithm. A user from Quasar Zone forums has managed to bypass the restriction by simply installing a dummy HDMI plug. By using the dummy plug, the card thinks that it is connected to a monitor and thus runs normally. Using this workaround, the user was able to set-up a four-way GeForce RTX 3060 mining rig with 48 MH/s hashing power per GPU, for the total 192 MH/s hash rate. You can buy HDMI dummy plugs for as low as $5.99 on Amazon or at any other store.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
However, even such a thing can be bypassed. Usually, miners put their GPUs in rigs where most of the GPUs don't use their video outputs. And the GPU can detect if it is connected to the monitor or not, triggering the anti-mining algorithm. A user from Quasar Zone forums has managed to bypass the restriction by simply installing a dummy HDMI plug. By using the dummy plug, the card thinks that it is connected to a monitor and thus runs normally. Using this workaround, the user was able to set-up a four-way GeForce RTX 3060 mining rig with 48 MH/s hashing power per GPU, for the total 192 MH/s hash rate. You can buy HDMI dummy plugs for as low as $5.99 on Amazon or at any other store.
76 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Anti-Mining Feature Bypassed by HDMI Dummy Plug
I mean, take an extra 30 minutes, look things up (and proof-read while you're at it) and you could be in line with all the other editors on TPU. It shouldn't be that hard, should it?I wasn't going to dignify that with an answer, but since when is "making more profit" unethical?
A lot of that now seems unethical.
making more profit is not unethical, but using unethical ways, such as lying, making fake statements, announcements, lying about prices and MSRP, about availability, making fake technologies, such as DLSS which is simply lowering resolution but claiming you are using higher one! and many other lies just for making more profit is definitely unethical
this is another ethical move from nvidia; threatening press
48mh isn't too shabby. Gets almost 5 dollars a day so if you found it at msrp you'd have this card paid off in about 3 months.I don't think its a priority as much as they are probably contractually obligated to supply X amount of chips. If they had a choice, AMD would be manufacturing 1k GPUs all day. Profit margin is one of the reasons Nvidia didn't fight that hard for those console contracts.
Whether what Nvidia did here is also unethical comes down to whether you're willing to consider all the circumstances that need to be met so you can use the leaked driver to unlock the full 3060 potential or you're just reading the press titles and just conclude Nvidia planned to do this to somehow sabotage their own plans. And to do this, you also have to disregard that even with 3060 off-limits, miners still had unfettered access to 3060Ti, 3070, 3080 and 3090.
With almost every Pr release regarding anything to do with mining or being the gamer's friend and saviour to be massively unethical.
And no I would argue Pr releases need to be ethical Or they need to be called out on the bullshit they peddle.
Lies shouldn't be tolerated OR spread.
you cannot "accidently" leak a driver that unlocks a card that was supposed to be locked from the begining!
The leaked driver enables full speed mining on some cards as long as the cards are connected directly to the motherboard (miners usually connect cards using risers, because otherwise you can only fit 3 of them in a system) and are also connected to an external monitor. Instead of using a real monitor, you can stick that dongle in the HDMI port.
But just getting a 3060 and inserting the HDMI dongle, achieves nothing.
the dongle bypasses that
i find that funny that these smart people implementing the locks never thought that would happen
Later edit: What's even worse is that the original article from Tom's Hardware, listed as a source, makes it very clear it's not "by simply", because you also need that beta driver. So there is really no excuse for the author to publish this misleading article. The "intensive research" required to publish the correct information was reading more than the title of the quoted source.